An Unfinished Score (20 page)

Thirty

Olivia is late to the fourth day’s rehearsals, which are held in the orchestra’s broad, spare, absolutely beautiful performance auditorium. Despite the cavernous ceiling spaces and open wings, the hall is made warm with color and the textures of wood, concrete, fabric. The effect is not emptiness but simplicity. Suzanne loves it immediately and wishes Alex could have conducted here instead of in the dilapidated glory of Chicago’s red-and-white auditorium, suggesting a heyday decades gone.

Despite her jitters, despite everything, Suzanne feels strong, or at least at ease in her own body, with her own face. Today is the first time the full orchestra will work through each of the six compositions, and Suzanne is glad to be free of Olivia for now. Established composers and other guest faculty listen in, give broad impressions, occasionally make specific suggestions. There won’t be much time to fix anything beyond the most horrible wrong moments—the public performance is one night away—but still this is meant to be an educational experience.

“Not ideal circumstances, but not unique,” the conductor tells them. His Finnish accent, all but untraceable on the institute’s first day, comes heavier now. Fatigue, Suzanne assumes, based on her experience with Alex and with Petra, though she hears Lisa-Natasha whisper “Faker” to Eric.

“Don’t get caught up in the thrill—or in the agony—of hearing your work. Listen as dispassionately as you can to what you are actually hearing, not what you think you are going to hear or want to hear or what you are afraid of hearing. What you are actually hearing—that’s its own skill—and be open to alterations as needed. This part is as important as the original setting down of notes on the page or whatever you thought you heard in your mind that day inspiration hit you while you were eating your oatmeal or—” he pauses and finds the spot where Greg is sitting. “Or while you were drinking your third scotch.”

Suzanne sits through the compositions of the other composers, assuming the weight of Alex’s name is the reason they are scheduled last. Eric and Lisa-Natasha are up first, and Eric leaves immediately afterward, as though there is nothing to learn from the others. Their two pieces have some similarities, including evidence of mathematics-based training, reliance on percussion and bass to drive rhythm, and certain uses of atonality and line fracture that have become stock in any music wanting to proclaim itself postmodern. There are differences, too, mostly in mood, with Lisa-Natasha’s piece having a bit more fun than Eric’s, which is almost uniformly dark and, Suzanne guesses, self-pitying. Wishing Doug were at her side, if only for entertainment value, she jots down a few personality notes for him.

Bruce’s piece is also unsurprising given what she knows about him. It shows his classical training, his lifetime of experience in full orchestration, dependence on the violin roles, a pleasing if safe sense of symmetry, and a bright, exuberant sensibility. Paul’s work is more complicated and interesting. The ubiquitous note-counter tabulated his piece as having the fewest notes of all the compositions, and he draws many of them out, letting them reverberate in the hall’s still, cool air, reverberate in the listener’s ear. The composition is titled “Water,” and in it Suzanne feels water in a multitude of its forms. The music trickles, babbles, bubbles, sinks, gathers, roars, moves tidally in and out. Yet there’s nothing obvious or easy about how he’s done it. There is a bit of cleverness, but depth, too. Mostly it is lovely, nearly everyone agrees, and Suzanne looks at Paul with more respect, nodding when she catches his eye, glad that he seems pleased by his audience’s enjoyment.

Suzanne appreciates the institute’s willingness to produce such disparate works of music, its understanding that style is so often temporary in young composers, its desire to look beyond that for a more fundamental talent. All four pieces have been quite good, and she suspects the best is yet to come after the break, with Greg’s short symphony.

The music proves her right. Greg’s piece jumps in quality above everything else they’ve heard, and so she is surprised when two of the guest faculty voice sharp criticisms—not merely suggestions for the performance but actual dismissals of the work as a whole, words that cannot possibly help anyone a single day before a public performance. An older man leaps up to defend the piece, saying, “You can’t criticize it just because it’s a hundred times better than anything you ever wrote.”

Greg, who sits two rows in front of her, spins around and puts his hand alongside his mouth. “Oh, good, we get to hear a battle of the Old Schools. I don’t know whether it’s worse to be attacked or championed.”

“Your piece,” Suzanne says as the speaking men continue to argue. “Your piece is really great.”

His answer is simple—no puffing up but no false modesty, just an honest confidence. “Thank you.”

Maybe she’s so suggestible that Greg’s turning to talk to her prompts her to imitate the move, or maybe she can feel the gaze on the back of her head. She turns, and there is Olivia. Suzanne does not know how long she has been there, presumably since the end of the break, throughout Greg’s symphony and the discussion afterward.

There is something off about Olivia, or maybe on, some natural wildness she usually sleeks back, places under control. Maybe it’s just her hair, which now sprays loose about her shoulders. But there’s also again a strange set to her mouth. Though it’s not crooked, it reminds Suzanne of Ben’s mother on the boat at the scattering of Charlie’s ashes. Someone with a plan gone astray, someone letting something out of herself that she’s carefully hidden before.

“We’re up next,” Suzanne says just loudly enough to carry two rows. She spins back to face the orchestra, taking the deep inhalation that she has taken before every performance since her first recital in a church in South Philadelphia, wearing a dress her mother found at a consignment store, playing the Beethoven-for-kiddies piece well enough that everyone in the room knew she was different, knew she had something the rest of them didn’t.

The violist barely keeps up with the technical difficulty, but he gets through, and the double reeds play beautifully—better than she’s hoped or, more true, exactly as she’s hoped. She closes her eyes and tries to hear the relationships between the solo line, her moving line, and the full orchestra.

One of the guest faculty members halts the peculiar second movement and suggests a stronger entrance by the brass. “Also,” he says, “the strings are trying to rush the crescendos. Is that what you want?” he asks, turning to Suzanne. “It’s your job to speak up.”

From behind her she hears Olivia call out to the orchestra. “Let the conductor hold you, even slow down the crescendo at D. Too slow is better than too fast.”

Suzanne’s throat constricts, and she feels a twitch in a small muscle on the right side of her face. For that brief moment she thinks she is having a stroke. Her recovery is immediate, but still she remains silent, listening to the orchestra play out the Viola Concerto by Alexander Elling and Suzanne Sullivan. With full orchestration and herself in the audience instead of with bow in hand, she hears it for the first time. The concerto was written not to show her off but to ruin her. It was written not out of love but out of hatred.

Again her face twitches, followed by a crushing weight on her chest, and this time it feels not like a small stroke but like the end of everything. She
has
been wrong all along, spectacularly, humiliatingly, unbearably wrong. And now she has been undone.

As the conductor and concertmaster discuss strategies to prevent the audience from being fully duped and so angered by the false ending. Suzanne stands to leave.

She sees concern on Greg’s face and on Bruce’s, but only fascination on Lisa-Natasha’s as she tries to back away but instead leans over and vomits all over the empty seat in front of her.

Thirty-one

Alone in her room, her stomach empty and her arms weak, Suzanne raises her viola and plays the viola line as if for the first time. Just to be sure, she tells herself, though she already knows. She digs her bow hard into her strings, makes every crazy turn, every rise and fall, twisting at the waist so she will not miss a note. Her breath fails her more than once, her right arm aches, and her neck pinches. No matter how much she wants to distrust her instincts, the music is now obvious to her. The concerto is an act of retribution.

Suzanne feels stripped even of profound grief, and the emotion she is left with is shallow and pale, thin as gauze, its color washed away.
Doloroso
. But nothing more.

She can think of only two ways to stop the farce that Olivia has cast her in: she can call the music director or she can call Olivia. She spins out each scenario. The first one unfolds predictably: there is anger, a scratched program, upset musicians, public exposure, humiliation. The second she imagines in several alternatives, but the truth is that she cannot imagine what will happen if she confronts Olivia because she cannot imagine what Olivia will do. She has overestimated Olivia’s humanity and underestimated her brilliance. She does not know if Olivia cares if her whole plan is exposed—maybe the publicity is even what she wants. Almost certainly she will threaten to talk to Ben. She will tell Ben, and Suzanne will lose him, too.

She thinks of her musical reputation, of the quartet, of Anthony’s aspirations for them all. If the false Wikipedia entry about Alex calling music “a healing force” made headlines and ripped through the online world, how large a scandal might this be? What will its salacious headline be? Will people remember and care? Will they forgive Suzanne because she is the dupe, or is that the least sympathetic role of all to play? And she isn’t just the victim, of course; she is the
other woman
, the one who set into motion the whole sordid sequence.

It is two in the morning when she calls Petra, and so she is surprised by her quick answer. “Thank god,” Petra says. “I was starting to think you really wouldn’t call me.”

“It’s not good news,” Suzanne says and gives Petra her room number.

Petra arrives fast and wearing street clothes, as though she’s just come in from a night out. Suzanne asks her how much she’s had to drink.

“None. I quit.” She meets Suzanne’s look. “Not quite, but really I haven’t had anything to drink tonight. I’m trying to quit. I talked to Daniel about it. I figure there’s a chance I’m going to be a real single mom soon, and I need to learn how to do it.”

Suzanne takes the armchair, propping up her feet, insisting upon that distance between them.

“Where is Adele? You didn’t leave her with Ben, did you?”

Petra takes the bed, stretching out on her side, head propped up by her bent arm. “I asked him. Because he really is good with her, but he said no because he didn’t think I should come here. He told me to stay away from you.”

“So where is she?”

“This is how much I love you: I left her with Jennifer. She’s probably charting her progress day and night, turning her into some color of cat.” Petra rolls onto her back, then resumes her sideways position. “Suzanne, do you think we can start over?”

Suzanne laughs, a small sound. “That’s what I asked Ben.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said we can’t undo what is done. We can just keep going. He wants that, I think, to keep going.”

“And what’s your answer? What do you want?”

Suzanne cannot see a simple reconciliation with Petra, but neither can she imagine that they won’t be lifelong friends. Adele will need Suzanne, more than ever, even if Petra does shape up, grow up. After the terrifying surgery, she will need months of training, years of understanding. Her life will always be shaped by the simple, hard facts that she was born deaf and has no father she knows.

“I need you,” Suzanne whispers.

Petra springs up, starts to approach Suzanne but holds back a few feet. “I need you too, honey, more than you can guess.”

“No, I mean I need you right now.”

Petra looks confused, then hurt. “Taking me up on my offer? Maybe I deserve it, but please don’t do that to me.”

“Not everything’s about sex, Petra. There are other ways to connect people. Always going for the genitals is not a permanent strategy.”

“Maybe it’s the only way I’m good at.”

“I have a lot to tell you. If you love me, really love me, you’re going to promise me that you’ll never tell any of this to anyone, no matter how tempting, no matter how mad you get at me. Or how mad you get at Ben. Or how drunk and gossipy you ever feel. Can you say that?”

Petra sits down, leaning back on her hyperextended arms, feet hanging off the side of the bed. “It’s the least I can do. Tell me the whole thing of it.”

Suzanne starts at the beginning, with
Harold in Italy
, and the telling of her story takes a full hour as she tries to reconstruct the geographical order of her love affair with Alex. She tells Petra about the music, about her early jealousy, about his dark moods, about the night they made love while Felder played, about how lonely she always felt with Ben, about her guilt, about wanting money and fame or just to be special, about every performance she and Alex ever sat through together. She tries to remember details as she tells, so that Petra can understand what her story really is. Maybe her friend can tell her how she has felt, how she feels. Finally she tells Petra about the plane crash, about Olivia’s machinations and how fully deceived she has been, which brings her to this moment.

“My god. I always think I’m the shocking one, but look how boring I am.”

Suzanne smiles, a genuine gesture.

“How did you hide all that? From Ben. From me.”

“Maybe that’s the part of me that was missing.”

Petra lies down. After a stretch of silence, Suzanne wonders if she has fallen asleep, but she listens closely and hears the pattern of Petra’s normal, waking breath.

Finally Petra sits up. “I think you just have to play things out.”

“Do what she wants? Go on with it all?”

Petra nods. “Unless you want to explode your whole life, that’s what you should do.”

“It might explode anyway.”

Petra nods. “But it will definitely explode any other way.”

Suzanne nods short and fast, for a long time, settling into the idea, the plan that is no plan at all. “I’ll be at her mercy.”

“I think you already are, sweetie. If you defy her you’ll be exploding your own life, but still it won’t really be on your terms.”

Petra and Suzanne sleep fully clothed, side by side, all morning. They order room service, Suzanne adding a ridiculously generous tip to the already steep bill. “It might be my last meal. Besides, empty stomach.”

“I’m glad you can laugh about throwing up in front of a room full of music people.”

“The alternative is too depressing,” Suzanne answers, biting into a strawberry, trying to decide which sandwich she wants.

“I’m flying home a day later than you. I thought it was the right thing to do, to give you and Ben the house to yourself at first.”

“You know we can’t live together anymore.”

“I figured that out by myself. I was just talking about right away.”

“I promised I would always be there for Adele, and I will. We’ll work it out so that it’s good for her, so that it’s okay for everyone. It doesn’t have to happen tomorrow, so we can figure it out. We can’t live together, but I will be there for her.”

“Will you be there for me?”

Suzanne shrugs. “We’re going to have to play that by ear.”

Petra smiles, rueful. “Rotten pun.”

“The best I can do, but I promise I’ll be there at the surgery, and after. She’s going to be able to hear, to hear music.”

“Okay.” Petra looks away, biting her lower lip, obviously close to crying. She repeats herself in a whisper, “Okay.”